If your self-control runs out by the end of the day, you just haven’t found the right motivation.

It may not seem like it now, but self-control is unlimited.

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We’ve all been there — three weeks into a new resolution to eat well when a coworker’s birthday means a delicious chocolate layer cake will be in the office, probably at 4 pm when you’re tired and hungry, and full of all the refined sugars you’ve been denying yourself. You give in, and dig in. Does this mean you’ve maxed out your self-control resources?

Well, no, because according to a new opinion article published in Trends of Cognitive Sciences, self-control isn’t a limited resource. In other words, it’s not something that can ever run out. As long as you know how to find the right motivations, the authors argue, your self-control should be limitless.

Researchers from the University of Toronto, Texas A&M University, and the University of Aberdeen pointed to numerous studies that countered the idea that self-control can “run out.”

For example, if you give people tasks that require a lot of self-control (a classic example is reading color words printed in other colors), their performance drops over time. But, the researchers noted, the performance decline does not happen if you give them proper motivation. For example, paying them works, but so does telling them their participation could help them in some way, say by preventing Alzheimer’s disease, said study author Michael Inzlicht, PhD, associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.

Additionally, people who believe in personal prayer found that taking breaks to do so improved their performance. Furthermore, people who enjoyed the tasks didn’t seem the same dip in performance.

If self-control was actually finite, when you ran out, it would be like running out of gas in a car,Dr. Inzlicht said. No matter how motivated you might be, the car still wouldn't drive without more gasoline. Luckily, though, the researchers think self-control is unlimited, you just need to figure out how to better tap into it. In gas tank terms, that means the proper motivation is enough to restart your car.

The theory used to be that “self-control waxes and wanes throughout the day,” but the new research shows otherwise. “What waxes and wanes is not people’s ability but people’s motivation to take on these behaviors,” Inzlicht said.

This all may be well and good, but how exactly can you take advantage of this new research?

Decide Why You Want to Do It

Everyone has "have-to" tasks, “carried out through a sense of duty, obligation or guilt,” and "want-to" tasks, “carried out because they are personally enjoyable and gratifying,” the researchers wrote. For example, a "have-to" task might be going to the gym while a "want-to" task is watching TV. The trick is to figure out how to redefine the "have-to" tasks as "want-to" tasks.

Michael McKee, PhD, a clinical psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic, noted that people respond much better to desires than commands. “I can remember as a very young boy thinking, ‘Oh, I’ll take out the garbage,’” Dr. McKee said. “But if my mother told me to, I’d say no.”

If your goal is to exercise more, make sure to pick a type of exercise that will make you happy. Don’t force yourself to jog if you’re not a natural jogger, McKee advised. “There are only a small number of people who can stick with it out of pure self-discipline,” he said.

If, each day, you figure out what type of small exercise, be it taking a walk or dancing around your house, will make you happy, you’re much more likely to stick to the plan. Not only does this method make sure you enjoy your task, stopping to pick an exercise can be a critical help for another reason — you can also take that moment to remind yourself of why you’re doing what you’re doing.

For McKee, he remembered his time in grad school when he was writing his dissertation for 12 hours a day while still trying to keep up with everything else, and noted that to continue working he would “affirm my core value that I really need to do this.”

Andrada Neacsui, PhD, psychologist at Duke University Medical Center, noted, however, that sometimes it may not always be possible to manipulate things you "have to" do into things you "want to" do. She argued that sometimes these categories aren’t so black and white — for example, on some nights she may be really excited about cooking dinner while on others, it’s a chore. At any rate, the researchers didn’t test whether reframing helps people accomplish more, she said, though she acknowledged that their argument predicts it does.

Even so, she still found useful takeaways from the work.

“Pay attention to maintaining the balance between the things we want to do and the things we have to do,” she said. Make sure to interweave pleasurable tasks into the tasks you must do. She cited research that’s shown that if you do something you like after doing something you don’t, you enjoy the pleasurable thing even more, she said. If you have several difficult tasks, she also suggests you do the hardest things first.

Finally, both Neacsui and Inzlicht agreed that the theory also explains why taking a break is worthwhile. It gives you a chance to reward yourself and circle back to your motivation, whether it’s a walk to a coffee shop or a short vacation.

Go ahead, take that break. It may give you the time you need to remember why you’re not eating that chocolate cake.

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